


and you told me i should concentrate

by paperclipbitch



Category: Torchwood
Genre: 2007 pop culture references, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Light Angst, M/M, just go with the handwaving guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 18:24:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14982953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: There's a story Owen doesn't tell.





	and you told me i should concentrate

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Only If For A Night_ by Florence  & the Machine]
> 
> **Overindulgent Author's Note:**  
>  _Torchwood_ was my big fandom between the ages of sixteen and eighteen - I wrote unbelievable amounts of fic, some of which is great, some of which I flinch at now. Anyway, I've retained a fondness but honestly not thought much about it for a long time; then, last week, the night before my twenty-eighth birthday, I dreamed about Owen and Ianto. I've had a few days of very weird nostalgia, and decided, instead of talking to my therapist about it, to write something. This is what came out.

There’s a story Owen doesn’t tell.

The fact is, there are a lot of stories he _can’t_ tell: because they’re classified, or they’re terrifying, or they’re embarrassing, or they’re just plain _gross_ (aliens come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but once they’re dead and on his autopsy table, they’re pretty much all the same: oozy). Maybe that’s all he really is, at least on his bad days, his worst days: a collection of dreadful stories, each one bleaker than the last. He’s all nicked edges and scar tissue, bitter and snarling. He’s hardly the first or the last Torchwood employee to fit this description, all of them just cogs in a machine that grinds down and _down_.

Rain drips out of Ianto’s hair. He shuts his eyes for a long moment and then opens them again, blinks a couple of times like he’s rebooting something. Owen lets the car radio jolt them along, leaving them to the uneasy silence that they carry carefully between them, aware that one good slip and it could shatter. Well. It doesn’t even need to be a _good_ slip.

Not that he thinks about it often, but Owen was a real person once. The kind with a mortgage and a steady girlfriend who he intended to be with forever, and a proper job that he loved even when the hours were long and his patients were dead and he couldn’t remember the last time that he slept. And then all of that was gone, so fast he didn’t even see the door slamming behind it, and somewhere along the line he gave up. He’d say he doesn’t remember the fractures, the fault lines, he just woke up one day and here he was, all snap and sarcasm and the awareness that it doesn’t matter what he does, because it’ll be ingloriously over earlier than he expects (he’d say _earlier than he deserves_ , but that doesn’t ring true anymore). The truth is that he _does_ remember, that he felt himself slipping, and he peeled his fingertips from the edge because he saw that he might as well drop, save time all round, give up the shitty metaphor and hand back the ghost.

Ianto knows about Katie, much as Owen would like him not to; it’s easier to claim that he’s always been like this, less of an origin story than an origin slump, but Ianto files the paperwork and updates the personnel files, and if curiosity _actually_ killed the cat then there wouldn’t be a Torchwood at all, just a bunch of aliens fucking up the streets of Cardiff. It’s not like they’ve discussed it, compared dead girlfriends or anything, but Owen knows that Ianto knows, and it has always chafed.

He doesn’t need to ask if Ianto was ever a real person; Ianto has a date he can pinpoint and everything, a short drop and a sudden stop.

“Thank you,” Ianto says quietly. 

Owen shrugs, eyes on the road. “Hey,” he says, “if you’re going to be a twat, someone should be there to mop up afterwards.”

A laugh catches somewhere in Ianto’s throat. “I thought that was my motto.”

Owen shrugs. “Can’t be a twat twenty-four/seven,” he says. 

“I do need to get some sleep occasionally,” Ianto agrees mildly.

It’s easy to do this, prod at each other with increasingly blunt needles; it comes easier than anything else does, really. They could probably keep this up all the way back to Cardiff. Instead, Owen reaches to poke at the radio; he can’t listen to _Bleeding Love_ again. Two thousand and seven, seriously. Ianto makes a noise when the next radio channel is playing _Hey There Delilah_ , though Owen’s always had a soft spot for the curl of _oh it’s what you do to me_ ; maybe he’s getting sentimental in his old age. Ianto jabs at the radio until it turns off.

“How’s Tosh?” Owen asks, quiet enough that maybe he’ll pretend that it’s lost under the windscreen wipers, and Ianto won’t have to answer.

Ianto doesn’t look at him. “Happy,” he offers at last.

Owen is glad. Owen is relieved. Owen is glad and relieved and maybe he’ll just turn this car off the motorway and they can lie in a ditch and look up at the glowering sky and those can be their last inglorious moments, fuck it all.

“I miss her,” Ianto adds quietly, when the silence has been long and strained enough. The roads are wet and quiet today, and there’s no one around, just them and the car and the endless, inescapable knowledge of exactly who they are. “You can miss her too. I won’t think any less of you for it.”

Thinking about Tosh is picking at a scab that will never heal naturally, and Owen reaches for the loophole without even thinking about it: “is it actually _possible_ for you to think less of me?”

Ianto shrugs, that little half-smirk Owen used to think was permanently stapled to his mouth flickering in and out, like faulty reception. “I don’t know, there are some nights when you’re almost tolerable.”

Owen rolls his eyes. “You mean, when I’ve got my mouth too full to talk?”

“Something like that.” Ianto’s eyelashes are long in profile, glancing against his cheeks when he looks down at his hands, splayed against the wet denim of his jeans like he’s half-forgotten about them.

Owen hasn’t forgotten that Ianto used to talk about Jack in that tone.

The look Ianto casts him is not the way he used to look at Jack. Or maybe there is; there’s something waxing wistful in it.

“We’re not at Torchwood anymore,” he says, each word careful, “you can… you can think about these things if you want to.”

Owen _doesn’t_ want to.

“We’re still on the payroll,” he reminds Ianto, taps fingers against the steering wheel to the rhythm of _Karma Police_. Well, it’s true: you give all you can and it’s never enough.

It’s almost definite that Torchwood doesn’t know that it’s paying them, but then Ianto says the paperwork was always such a mess that by the time anyone looks at where the money is being siphoned off to, it’ll. Well. It’ll be too late anyway.

“You could’ve chosen to be happy,” Ianto tells him, slicing sharply through pop culture reference and retort alike, and Owen grits his teeth and floors the accelerator. They don’t speak again; after another half hour of silence, Ianto puts the radio back on, and they both sigh as _She’s So Lovely_ blares out of the speakers, but neither of them do anything about it.

Tosh is cleverer than both of them, frankly: when Jack laid out the proposition, she knew when to jump, and now she lives a life where she gets to use her genius for good, and she’s happy, and she doesn’t spend every other day having another fucking existential crisis and bickering about events that happened a long time ago, if it turns out they even happened at all.

Here’s the story Owen doesn’t tell: not the one where a version of Jack turned up in the Hub, haggard and exhausted, and pulled him and Ianto and Tosh away with him, and told them that he was saving their lives the only way he knew how. Not the one where Jack separated them from the timeline that was apparently going to kill them all, and then wrapped them in a three-year time loop to give them as much time as he could. Not the one where he offered them retcon so they could live nearly-normal lives and never notice the déjà vu, and Tosh cried and accepted him and Owen should’ve and didn’t. Not the one where they live the same three years over and over, but not part of Torchwood, adjacent to their past selves but never close enough to touch. Not the one where Owen kissed Ianto one night to prove a point or possibly to shut him up, and then kissed him again because he could, and then kissed him _again_ with no reason other than that he wanted to, and every time Ianto kissed him back, and somehow they’re here, creeping around the fringes of their old lives and Tosh’s new one, because neither of them were ever any good at letting go.

They rehash all of it in the end: drunk, and sober, and tired, and bitter, and sometimes as something like bastardised pillow talk, fighting off the urge to hold one another by bickering over whose fault something long superfluous was in the _first_ place. There’s enough blame to carry them through loop after loop after _loop_ , and if they were keeping count in the first place, they aren’t now. They carry through their memories, but nothing else, and there’s never anything new under the sun anymore. Same old alien invasions. Same old top forty. Same old arguments.

Owen doesn’t tell the story of the retcon that he kept, of the day when he was finally ready to let it all go and start a life somewhere with fewer _edges_ , with less exhaustion and bitterness and constant, fucking _guilt_. Of how he was going to take it, and fade away, and give in to something like happiness, because the right kind of ignorance can be the right kind of bliss, but then he thought about Ianto, left alone to remember and carry their collective past together in that constantly ticking and whirring brain of his. He thought about Ianto, sleeping in the bed they could refer to as _theirs_ if they wanted to acknowledge that they’re more serious than they ever intended to be, Ianto ghosting around, the last person left who knew the truth, and he couldn’t do it. He flushed the retcon so that he could never be tempted, and he chose this. Whatever it is, he chose it twice, and every morning when he wakes up and Ianto is making coffee and humming because old habits die hard, he chooses it again.

They share a flat because the rent in Cardiff is murder, despite the presence of the Rift, or because they’re sentimental despite themselves, or because it’s easier not to cross paths with their past selves if they’re contained, or because sometimes Owen likes it when he wakes up in the middle of the night reaching for nothing and finds Ianto instead, striped pyjamas because he’s ridiculous and awake every fucking time to reach back. Owen parks the car, listens to the rain on the roof, and exhales slowly.

He still acts up because Ianto never lets him get away with it, and sometimes it’s okay and sometimes Ianto sprains his hand in the process of breaking Owen’s nose, and they have to sit in A&E together, taking it in turns to sulk and use the overpriced coffee machine. It’s something they’re still working on. It’s possible that they’ll never exactly get there, but then Torchwood taught Owen years ago that nothing ever has a clean, simple solution, or a definitive end.

“If you’re unhappy, there are things you can do about it.” Ianto’s voice is the colour of the rain, and there are so many things that Owen knows and won’t ever tell him. Maybe it’s just cruelty and emotional damage, but God, Ianto has enough on his sodding plate without whatever else Owen would like to pile on there.

“I’m not unhappy,” Owen replies, and Ianto goes and checks on Tosh periodically, always, just to make sure that she’s safe and okay and that her life is going right for her, and that nothing is creeping back into her mind to mar it. Owen never does. He can’t exactly think about why, because it’s like sliding a sharp point beneath his fingernails, ever more painful the more he pushes on it. Tosh made the right choice, and Owen didn’t, but he had his reasons, and some days they’re almost enough after all.

Ianto looks thoughtful, and Owen wonders what it would be like if they ever had a real actual conversation, not just the fringes of one before one or both of them run scared. Maybe he’ll save that for the next loop, the next time the years reset again.

“Have you sent yourself that particular memo?” Ianto asks carefully.

“I know,” Owen says, which isn’t an answer, and he shakes his head, looking at the rain, at Ianto, at the street and the block of flats they somehow call home, despite everything. “I’m okay.”

After a quiet moment of studying him, Ianto smiles, one of the grins that makes him look completely different: charming and sane and safe and like he never got mixed up in this bloody stupid lifestyle that lead him _here_. Owen doesn’t even know if he _can_ smile like that anymore; or maybe Ianto just doesn’t tell him when he does, preserving something that really only works if you keep it oblivious.

“Alright,” Ianto says lightly, “I’ll take that.”

He walks out into the rain, slamming the car door behind him and sprinting up the wet pavement toward their front door, patting his pockets for his keys like he always does, even though he keeps them in the same place every time. There would’ve been a time when Owen didn’t know that, but he does now.

Things have been better. Things have been worse. Owen nods to himself, like he’s confirming something, and follows Ianto.


End file.
